Run Wine on Raspberry Pi

Step-by-step instruction to run Wine on Raspberry Pi

using ExaGear Desktop

Wine is a compatibility layer that allows running Windows applications on Linux systems (www.winehq.org). But when it comes to Raspberry Pi, things are getting a bit more complicated. And here is why.

Windows apps are mostly compiled for x86 CPU architecture and they won’t run on ARM-based Raspberry Pi with Wine. ExaGear Desktop can solve the problem. It provides x86 Linux environment on your ARM device making it possible to run x86 Windows apps with Wine.

Another complexity comes from Raspberry Pi specificity with user/kernel virtual memory split. You should build Wine for 2G/2G split systems (by default it is configured for 3G/1G). We did it and added the right version of Wine to default repositories of ExaGear’s guest x86 system. So now to run Wine on Raspberry Pi using ExaGear Desktop you just need to follow setup instruction given below.

Raspberry Pi test stand configuration

Model

Raspberry Pi 2 Model B

Raspberry Pi 3

Frequency

1000 MHz

1200 MHz

Memory

1 GB RAM

1 GB RAM

Operating System

Raspbian Jessie from May 2016

Raspbian Jessie from May 2016

Software

Wine 1.8

Eltechs ExaGear Desktop for Raspberry Pi 2

Wine 1.8

Eltechs ExaGear Desktop for Raspberry Pi 3

Wine setup instruction

Install ExaGear Desktop

1. Put ExaGear Desktop archive with installation packages and ExaGear Desktop license key in the same folder. Open Terminal (command line), move to this folder and unpack the archive using the following command:

$ tar -xvzpf exagear-desktop-rpi3.tar.gz

2. Install and activate ExaGear by running the install-exagear.sh script:

$ sudo ./install-exagear.sh

That’s it.

Launch guest x86 system

3. Enter the guest x86 system by entering the following command:

$ exagear

Starting the shell in the guest image /opt/exagear/images/debian-8

You’re in the x86 environment that can be checked by running the ‘arch’ command:

$ arch

i686

4. It is recommended to update apt-get repositories on the first launch of the guest system:

$ sudo apt-get update

Install Wine

5. Install Wine in Terminal inside the guest system:

$ sudo apt-get install wine

Package manager will offer you to install a bunch of packages. Agree and start the installation.

6. Once the installation process is finished make sure that you have the Eltechs build of Wine installed:

$ wine --version

wine-1.8.1-eltechs

Run Wine

Now you can run .exe files with Wine and get x86 Windows programs installed and running on your Raspberry Pi.

After a while, you will see the “Default – Wine desktop” window and MS office Word Viewer installer with a dialog window inside. Follow the prompts to start the installation.

9. Install MS Office Compatibility Pack using Wine the same way:

$ wine FileFormatConverters.exe

10. Configure Wine window size.

By default, the Wine window has a fixed size that is not convenient to view Word documents. You can configure Wine to be able to run MS Word Viewer in a separate window with adjustable size. To do this run winecfg tool from Terminal:

$ winecfg

Then in “Wine configuration” window open the “Graphics” tab and unset “Emulate a virtual desktop” checkbox. Click on “Apply” and then “Ok” buttons.

This is it. Now you can close guest x86 terminal and run MS Word Viewer from the Raspbian start menu.

11. Run MS Word Viewer:

Final notes

This way you can install and run other Windows applications compatible with Wine on Raspberry Pi with ExaGear Desktop. Here is the Wine Application Database where you can get information on application compatibility with Wine as well as tips and tricks on Wine configuration for a particular application.

Using Wine with the ExaGear emulator you can try things you’ve thought were impossible before. For example, we’ve even tried to launch Netflix on RPi model 3 (learn our Raspberry Pi 3 Netflix case) or created a fully automatic trading robot by launching MetaTrader 4 on Raspberry Pi.We’re continuing to make different interesting projects for you, so stay in touch to learn more.

It is also worth noting that with ExaGear Desktop you can run practically any x86 app on Raspberry Pi and other ARM-based devices such as Odroid, Banana Pi, Beagleboard, Cubox, Jetson, Cubieboard etc.